KEY POINTS:
For decades it has endured jokes about smug suburbia and its pretensions to grandeur. Now the people of Penge are having the last laugh.
They came out to vote in their droves in the south London borough of Bromley, stretching from Penge to the edge of the countryside. In Boris Johnson they saw the scourge of drunken youths on their buses and the £25 ($63) congestion charge that threatens the school run 4WD. After eight years of tolerating Labour's Ken Livingstone, the suburbs revolted.
The uprising spread beyond London. From Bury to Reading, and Manchester, voters punished what they see as a stealth-taxing, meddling Labour Party oblivious to their straitened finances in Friday's local elections.
"This is about the angry suburbs," says one senior minister. "They feel overtaxed; they are angry about what they see as other people who are treated better but who don't work, like benefit scroungers and asylum seekers. They're angry about having these little devices hidden inside their rubbish bins to monitor what they recycle. They're angry about speed cameras. They're angry about practically everything."
And when the suburban revolt met the fury of those hit by the abolition of the 10p tax rate, meltdown ensued.
On the day that the troubled and nationalised bank Northern Rock announced it was cutting 2000 jobs, MPs canvassing council estates had payslips thrust at them to show how April's wages were slashed by the axing of the 10p rate.
Promises that Prime Minister Gordon Brown would tackle the issue by autumn cut no ice.
"These are people who take a calculator to the supermarket to check they can afford the food," says one North-East MP. "They needed the money now."
They were Labour's worst results since 1968. The party won 24 per cent of the votes cast, behind the Tories on 44 per cent and the Liberal Democrats on 25 per cent. In the 159 councils contested in England and Wales, Labour lost 331 councillors, the Tories gained 256 seats and the Liberal Democrats 34.
The returns reveal a party profoundly split over how to respond. The official line may be it was all about the faltering economy, but for many MPs the worry is faltering leadership.
And if they can't agree on the problem, Labour MPs certainly disagree on the solution. Ideological differences buried last year when Brown was crowned uncontested leader are back with a vengeance.
For now, Labour seems to have settled for a battle over its direction rather than leader. But as the scale of David Cameron's victory brings the Tory threat into focus, did last week mark the birth of a government-in-waiting?
What happened was the culmination of three years of painstakingly nurturing Tory activists in hostile urban environments. For the first time the party fielded a full slate in northern cities. In London, activists arrived by the busload from across the home counties to canvass and stuff envelopes.
Showers of glossy leaflets funded by the billionaire Lord Ashcroft - the man who paid for the return of New Zealand's war medals - targeted selected voters, whose concerns were identified right down to street level.
It paid off in spades. The Tories took Welsh seats they had barely heard of; an 18-year-old was elected in Southampton; Boris Johnson pulled off an extraordinary coup in London.
Cameron has almost certainly brought back the Tories who stopped voting in the 1990s, finding former Prime Minister Tony Blair broadly tolerable or despairing of unpalatable Tory leaders. But the Tories believe they have persuaded a critical number of Liberal Democrat supporters to defect.
Now it is time for the critical alchemy needed to win an election: turning serious numbers of grumpy Labour voters into active Tories.
This, then, is phase two: preparing for the prospect of power.
Francis Maude has spent months quietly culling advice from retired permanent secretaries and former ministers on how a Cameron administration could hit the ground running.
Maude's brief is to find the weak spots before Labour does. For, despite the advances, yawning gaps in the project remain. Cameron has little solid policy in key areas such as transport, big ideas, such as supporting marriage, remain vague, and there are conflicting messages about cutting taxes.
No wonder Cameron's theme will be that last week opened the door to power but that the Tories have still got to walk through it without tripping over.
- OBSERVER
